Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature By Nathanael O'Reil ...

exploration, and privilege a particular way of being postcolonial.⁶ Narrow definitions of “postcolonial” that exclude settler colonies such as Australia not only serve to marginalize rich bodies of literature and literary criticism, they also ignore and/or obscure the fact that there are many kinds of postcolonialism, many types of postcolonial societies, and many ways for texts to be postcolonial. One of the most prominent and influential postcolonial theorists, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, acknowledges that Australia is part of the postcolonial world and that Australia's postcoloniality is complex (xv, xviii). As Brian Edwards argues, “[J]ust as there is no monolithic postmodernism there is no single post-colonialism and nor should there be” (142). In this volume, I adhere to Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin's broad definition of “post-colonial,” which they describe as covering “all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (Empire 2). Thus, according to Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin's definition, all Australian literature is postcolonial, broadly speaking, since all Australian literature has been produced in a culture impacted by “the imperial process.”

However, while insisting that Australian literature is postcolonial literature and deserves equal status with the literature of other postcolonial nations, such as India, Nigeria, and Jamaica, I wish to acknowledge that Australian literature can be both postcolonial and not postcolonial and feel that insisting that Australian literature as a whole is solely postcolonial or not is reductive and essentialist. Clearly, many works of Australian literature are postcolonial in terms of subject matter and technique, and Australian society is postcolonial in many ways. However, many Australian texts do not engage with postcolonial issues at all, and Australian society can legitimately be viewed as other than postcolonial; for example, many Indigenous Australians understand Australia as a colonial or neocolonial society. In her essay “Black on Black,” Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko addresses colonialism and Indigenous land ownership, arguing that labeling Australia “post-colonial” is “the biggest crock of shit I've been asked to swallow in a long time,” since two years before the publication of her article, the Queensland government “used its legislative powers to put 12 percent of the state off-limits to